Money Talk

Man Finds $98,000 in Craigslist Desk

It’s always a pleasant surprise when you dig an old jacket out of the closet and find a dollar in the pocket. Multiply that feeling by, oh, about 98,000, and you might begin to imagine how Noah Muroff, a rabbi in New Haven, Conn., felt the other day.

After buying a used desk for about $200 on Craigslist, Muroff, who works at a local religious school, found that it wouldn’t fit through the door to his office. So he and his wife decided to take the desk apart to get it through the doorway. That’s when he noticed a plastic shopping bag wedged behind one of the drawers.

When Muroff peeked inside, he saw green. A whole lot of it. On top, “I saw a $100 bill,” he explained to a local TV news reporter. As it turned out, the bag contained $98,000 in bundles of cash.

As the rabbi told Vosizneias.com, a Jewish news website, “We looked at each other and said, ‘This can’t be real. This only happens in the movies.’ ”

What Muroff did next, according to the news site Mashable, is even more amazing. Instead of booking a vacation to Hawaii, he called the desk’s former owner, informed her that she’d left something in the desk and offered to return it. As it turned out, the money was an inheritance, which she’d hidden in the desk and somehow forgotten about. The original owner was so moved by Muroff’s honesty that she wrote him a thank-you note, in which she observed that “I do like to believe that there are still good people left in this crazy world we live in. You certainly are one of them.”

Though the size of Muroff’s find was extraordinary, apparently people find money inside secondhand items fairly often. If you’re hoping to be one of those lucky souls, here are some tips from a blogger on how to search for misplaced or forgotten cash at thrift stores.